Set goals and get used to setting them often. Set up daily goals for little things. Set up weekly and monthly goals to work toward even larger goals. Get used to writing your wants and needs on paper, and then actively working toward those goals. Youâ€™ll be glad you did, and youâ€™ll be amazed at [...]

Affiliate marketing is the single fastest growth industry on the Internet. Yet many people go into it without a solid recipe for success. Indeed, many look to earn extra income with affiliate marketing with no real plan, and that can severely hamper their efforts at becoming successful at it. Make no mistake, although affiliate marketing [...]

If there’s one thing just about everyone can use (aside from a rich and generous relative), it’s address labels. The average household sends out between six and a dozen bills per month, and that’s not counting all those letters to Great-Uncle Delmar, who doesn’t have a phone and doesn’t trust that Inter-web thingy. Besides the [...]

A couple weeks ago, I was investigating a drop off in traffic on one of my niche sites and realized that it had been booted from the Google index. Nothing obvious came to mind about why this might be. I hadn’t knowingly broken any of Google’s guidelines for webmasters. When I saw these posts on [...]

Sometimes being a click happy and easily distracted web surfer pays off. I was over at 43 Folders a couple days ago looking for productivity tips and I noticed the little store link waaaaay down at the bottom of their home page. If you click into the store at first you are presented with a [...]

Sometimes being a click happy and easily distracted web surfer pays off. I was over at 43 Folders a couple days ago looking for productivity tips and I noticed the little store link waaaaay down at the bottom of their home page. If you click into the store at first you are presented with a directory of topics…nothing too special, but if you click into one of the categories you come to a pretty nifty looking store, that has cool features like a shopping cart, “live” prices and sales and product reviews. Are you thinking this sounds a lot like Amazon? Well it is!

As far as ease of install it gets about 6.5 out of 10. You’ll need to be a slight techie to set permissions on the files when you upload them to your server. They do have good instructions on their site [ Associate-O-Matic ].

The part I really like is that it allows you to customize the set of products that you pull from Amazon. So for example I created a Rich Dad section [natch] by choosing Amazon’s book category and sending the keyword “Rich Dad”. I could create a Business Books category using the same method. One of the things that I don’t like about the way 43 Folders has it set up is that have the whole Amazon catalogue in their store, which I personally found confusing. I think products that are related to the site topics are better for the visitor’s experience.

The one you see running on my site is the full version, which they allow you to test drive for free for 30 days. At that time I will need to pay the $99 dollars to buy a license or get downgraded to the free version. The free version takes 1/10 of your sales and puts them under Associate-O-Matic’s Amazon ID, so probably better to pay for the full version.

Another huge bonus with the paid version is that the license allows you to install it on as many sites as want as long as the Amazon ID associated with the installs belongs to you. So if you have 5 sites…that’s $20 per site and you can have a customized store with a related product set for each site.

A great idea, that’s been well executed and I’m looking forward to seeing how it works out.

There’s a very interesting study over at Maketing Serpa [which will only be available online for free until Feb. 24...sign up for their newsletter to get these articles delivered every week], which suggests that giving out tacky promotional pens may benefit the bottom line for your business more than buying ads on the web or [...]

During a recent vacation I was looking for a magazine to take along and I was surprise to find revenue The Performance Marketing Standard which is dedicated to internet marketing for affiliates. The Fall 2005 issue featured stories on topics such as click fraud, the future for search engines, how to capitalize on local search [...]

I’m not big into Christmas so I mostly just wish the whole gift-giving thing would go away. Jscott, who woke on the 25th to find his stocking filled with coal thinks it was a bad thing, but with the current price of heating fuels, I think he should reevaluate. As for me, dispite acting like [...]